|
The administration of the kosmos is to be thought of as that
of a living unit: there is the action determined by what is
external, and has to do with the parts, and there is that
determined by the internal and by the principle: thus a doctor
basing his treatment on externals and on the parts directly
affected will often be baffled and obliged to all sorts of
calculation, while Nature will act on the basis of principle and
need no deliberation. And in so far as the kosmos is a conducted
thing, its administration and its administrator will follow not
the way of the doctor but the way of Nature.
And in the case of the universe, the administration is all the
less complicated from the fact that the soul actually
circumscribes, as parts of a living unity, all the members which
it conducts. For all the Kinds included in the universe are
dominated by one Kind, upon which they follow, fitted into it,
developing from it, growing out of it, just as the Kind
manifested in the bough is related to the Kind in the tree as a
whole.
What place, then, is there for reasoning, for calculation, what
place for memory, where wisdom and knowledge are eternal,
unfailingly present, effective, dominant, administering in an
identical process?
The fact that the product contains diversity and difference does
not warrant the notion that the producer must be subject to
corresponding variations. On the contrary, the more varied the
product, the more certain the unchanging identity of the
producer: even in the single animal the events produced by Nature
are many and not simultaneous; there are the periods, the
developments at fixed epochs- horns, beard, maturing breasts, the
acme of life, procreation- but the principles which initially
determined the nature of the being are not thereby annulled;
there is process of growth, but no diversity in the initial
principle. The identity underlying all the multiplicity is
confirmed by the fact that the principle constituting the parent
is exhibited unchanged, undiminished, in the offspring. We have
reason, then, for thinking that one and the same wisdom envelops
both, and that this is the unalterable wisdom of the kosmos taken
as a whole; it is manifold, diverse and yet simplex, presiding
over the most comprehensive of living beings, and in no wise
altered within itself by this multiplicity, but stably one
Reason-Principle, the concentrated totality of things: if it were
not thus all things, it would be a wisdom of the later and
partial, not the wisdom of the Supreme.
|
|